organisation
Losing yourself
Instructional designers need to help learners to suspend disbelief creating a ‘place’ where they can enjoy themselves and learn
Vaughan Waller
change for the learners? This is the accepted way of designing a learning intervention. At the start the participants will be shown the ubiquitous slide which states, as it has since the year dot, “At the end of this course the learner will be able to …” followed by carefully chosen adjectives that follow the SMART rules. Now, if the instructor or designer has read the theory, he or she will revisit these objectives again and again, probing as to whether the learners are indeed able, or show that they are able, to do what they were not able to do before. If they don’t do this, then the objectives stated at the start are either wishful thinking or pure speculation.
A This is not particularly easy within an e-learning
module. The objectives slide is usually still there and if the designer has the opportunity he or she will ask the learners through various means if they have learnt what they were meant to learn. The assumption here is that the learner is fully motivated to do this learning and importantly recognises it as beneficial to them personally. If this perception is absent and they are not motivated to complete it, then they can simply lie enabling them to get to the end of the course as quickly as possible. You can lock the course so that the learner has to complete every page, do every exercise and get the pass mark but this is a last resort and is disliked by all. You can create branching questions which will show whether the learner has learnt what was intended to be learnt and demand that they go
ll instructional courses are designed with learning objectives as the starting point; in other words what does this course aim or intend to
We should always strive to create a ‘place’ in which the learner can enjoy themselves and also learn along the way.
back to the beginning and do it again until they do but that does not win you any friends either. There seems to be a disconnect somewhere between learning objectives and self-paced learning. Of course, the difference with e-learning is that it is not (or is rarely) collaborative and hence there is not the communication path between tutor and learner. To replace this, the design of the e-learning has to be effective in other ways, most of which are visual in nature, meaning that text on screen is kept to an absolute minimum. Of course, while doing without text altogether is near impossible in most cases, it is always a worthy aim. Well produced video and audio (what used to be called multimedia) are both great at engaging the learner and are usually well worth the budget. But they are still largely passive and are usually used to set up something that follows. But we still need something to show whether the learning objectives have been met. A question, of whatever type, forces or should force the learner to think. We don’t want an automatic response as in “It’s number 2 since I know that the others are wrong” type of thought. Instead, we are looking for a “Well if point 1 is true and point 2 is false then the answer could be one of three possible answers – the answer is in there somewhere so let’s read that again” type of thought. This requires realistic scenarios,
… the difference with e-learning is that it is not (or is rarely) collaborative and hence there is not the communication path between tutor and learner. To replace this, the design of the e-learning has to be effective in other ways…
e.learning age april 2015
believable characters, well-written dialogue and a full understanding of the subject material. For reasons I have never understood, for some accountancy subjects subject matter experts (SMEs) like to use terms like Entity A and Entity B, they use CUs (currency units), selling widgets or something else totally unrealistic. When realistic terms are suggested that would create mental pictures I am usually told that accountants don’t do fun and that they are used to this sort of thing. I don’t believe this for a moment. But here lies the answer. How many times have you watched a film or TV programme and spotted a slight inconsistency between scenes – a continuity error? The edifice collapses and you can no longer take the fiction seriously. Your ability to suspend disbelief is gone and the chances of you sticking with it are much reduced. Producers and directors try very hard to create and maintain this edifice but we seldom apply this level of rigour to e-learning programmes. We should always strive to create a ‘place’ in which the learner can enjoy themselves and also learn along the way. This way we can achieve those learning objectives without having to make them the focus of the whole programme. But here too, the moment that place becomes false then the enjoyment is lost and the learner will no longer learn.
So stop a moment and think about the last time
that you lost yourself in a learning programme; so engrossed in it that you lost track of time and place but emerged from it changed from the person who went in? It doesn’t happen often does it? But it should.
Vaughan Waller is a regular contributor to e.learning age
15
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